I hear Jim Blizzard is having another Portland Nerd Dinner. I wanted to go meet Rory in person, maybe see Scott (who I haven’t seen since KL last year) and continue a conversation I was having with Chris last week on campus. Not going to make it this time. I could use the holidays as an excuse, but the truth is that I’ve got an early morning all-hands division meeting to see Return of the King and I’d like to get more than three hours of sleep.

From Sean Alexander’s Addicted to Digital Media blog, I learned that the Dish Network is planning on bringing a HDTV-PVR system to market in a few weeks. I was just begining to wonder about HDTV + PVR functionallity. I’m really interested in how Media Center systems will incorporate this functionallity. I really dig the new Gateway Media Center with it’s stereo-component form factor. According to the specs, it has Composite A/V inputs to the TV Tuner card. Does that mean it can PVR HDTV too?

I cut my teeth developing for the windows platform with Windows++ by Paul Dilacia. It was about building a framework to wrap the Win32 api. Because of the elegance of Windows++, I never ever liked MFC. I disliked it so much that when I joined Microsoft, one of my ex-coworkers remarked “But you hate Microsoft” to which I replied “No, I hate MFC.”

Anyway, even though most people have moved on to managed code now, Microsoft continues to ship updates to the Windows Template Library. WTL is an extension to the Active Template Library that supports typical Windows applications (controls, dialogs, frame windows, GDI objects, etc). The new 7.1 version support VS.NET 2003, Windows XP and Windows CE.

I wish I had had access to WTL back in the day. I liked it so much better than MFC.

…but to really screw up, you need a computer. Or in the case of the BCS, you need seven of them.

I’m sure the Nokia Sugar Bowl officials are really excited about hosting “The Battle for Second Place”